Soul Of Britain (BBC 1, Sunday)
Football Stories (Channel 4, Monday)
Three Lions (BBC 1, Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday)
The J-Wanderer (Network 2, Wednesday)
It was the "rap Christianity" which lingered in the mind. A deliriously colourful band called The Tribe horsed around on a school stage as pubescent pupils jived to the vibe and waved their hands above their heads. There was some predictable guff along the lines of "Jesus" and "He Da Man" and it was all probably quite harmless. But "cool" it wasn't. In fact, it appeared so arch that, by comparison, even the cheesiest of the old folk-mass groups might have had all the cred of Bob Dylan in his pomp.
They hadn't, of course. But "rap Christianity" only dug the "make-religion-relevant-to-the-yoof" hole ever deeper. The Tribe and their audience featured on Soul of Britain, an engaging but perplexing example of sociology-by-numbers. Presented by Michael Buerk and promising to "explore the values, beliefs and attitudes shaping modern Britain", the opening episode of this new series was based on the Soul of Britain poll, for which 1,000 people were "randomly selected" and questioned over the phone.
A soul poll? Well, the childish rhyme lends itself to rapping but there's a typical, contemporary coldness - a reductionism - to the methodology. Buerk told us that the poll would uncover "what people really believe in", thereby making clear "fundamental attitudes". Certainly, its findings ought not be summarily dismissed but in matters of the soul - of all things - a poll seems especially vulnerable to superficial answers. Quantifying what, by definition, is immaterial (in the sense of nonmaterial, not irrelevant) has a certain unavoidable irony.
Anyway, the poll suggested that 25 per cent of British people believe in God; 69 per cent believe people have souls; 62 per cent reject the idea that Jesus was divine; 45 per cent believe Britain would be a worse place without religion and only eight per cent call themselves atheists. The poll produced a blizzard of other statistics but those opening ones established the big picture: the Christian churches are in serious decline and are being replaced by a patchwork of a la carte beliefs.
Travel, immigration and the information explosion continue to make Britain more diverse than ever. Historically, given its world role and population, Britain has understandably appeared to Ireland as bigger and more influential than is actually the case. But it, too, is being transformed by globalisation - cultural as well as economic. For more than 1,000 years, Christianity has been the faith that shaped Britain. But nowadays, even more than in this country, the social role of British Christianity is being reduced.
Perhaps nothing says more about the spirit of the age than the fact that the BBC sees fit to make a series about the spirit of the age. Though initially it seemed typically unbecoming, it was uniquely appropriate that an old church had been converted into an advertising agency. The dominant messages now are glossy commercials, not traditional sermons. Even in architecture, it was pointed out how shopping centres are now built with the grandiosity formerly associated with churches.
The largest non-Christian religion in Britain is Islam. There are one and a half million Muslims and just 300,000 Jews. Synagogue attendance is declining as sharply as Christian church attendance, suggesting that Islam is the most energetic of organised faiths nowadays. Then there are New Agers, greens and vegetarians, many of whom display a religious zeal in their ideologies In fact, there are now five million vegetarians in Britain and their numbers continue to grow. . . organically, of course.
We met Pete Defoe, "a green campaigner" who, in truth, appears to be conducting an intensely passionate love affair with nature. Pete makes use of solar power, windmills and recycled waste (for solid fuel) but, for all its alleged environmental concern, it looked to be a grim and grimy existence. Seeing Pete use his laptop added a bizarre touch to the allegedly "natural" lifestyle. Yet, in its way, his blend of green living and commercial hi-tech signalled the patchwork future.
Tomorrow night, Soul of Britain will ponder whether or not science has reduced religious faith to just another superstition. It's a reasonable question. But, given the soul poll and the statistical analysis, has science - albeit in the form of social science - not already reduced religious faith to number crunching? Sure, it reveals a kind of truth from which trends and patterns can be discerned. Can it, though, reach inside the human soul - however that might be defined - and feel sure that its findings are really reflecting the light? After all, knowing what you believe is often as fraught as believing what you know.
FOR decades, sociologists and other commentators have pointed to the quasi-religious aspects of football. The spectacle, ritual, colour, "congregations", passion and even occasional frenzy associated with the game clearly resemble primitive religious practices. It's thoroughly orchestrated nowadays, of course. Even the TV ads regularly cast the role of football in the starkest good versus evil terms. We've seen world-famous players battle against demons and robotic cyberbaddies. It's all about as subtle as rap Christianity.
Anyway, to set the mood for Euro 2000, which kicks-off today, Channel 4 screened Football Stories and the BBC gave us, over three nights, Three Lions. Football Stories, subtitled Cheer Up, Kevin Keegan, focused on the England v Scotland play-off matches for Euro 2000 qualification. Anecdotal and moody, it was as centrally concerned with questions of national and individual identities as with football itself.
We heard the Scots booing God Save the Queen at Hampden Park and it was clear that, whatever about the fervour of its supporters in Northern Ireland, the union within Britain is dissolving. "The England team is our only outlet for nationalism," said one bullishly articulate Englishman. "I'm not British, I'm English and that doesn't make me a fascist or a right-wing bigot or anything." Well, fair enough. It does mean, though, that even English sentiments are becoming increasingly anti-union.
So much more powerful and populous than the other members of the United Kingdom, England, said the Scots, is synonymous with arrogance. Whether this judgment reflected a Scottish inferiority complex, an English superiority complex or a mix of both remains a matter of perception. The Scots repeatedly complained that, in England, "class comes into it too much". Indeed it does, but the implication that class is a much less significant issue in Scotland was disingenuous.
Then there was the media. England manager Keegan justifiably attacked certain newspapers and broadcast outfits for "trying to make a war out of a couple of games of football". He was right too, for few media scams are as hypocritical as the cynical cycles of incitement and condemnation which the worst of the British media encourage every time the England team plays in a seriously competitive match. "The English papers and commentators are so biased, so, so biased, we can only laugh," said a Scots fan.
Denied access to film the games at Hampden and Wembley, Football Stories opted to film deserted streets. This was a visual cliche, of course, but it worked surprisingly well in context. On the train to London (where Scotland's 10 win would be insufficient to overturn England's 2-0 victory in Glasgow) a more thoughtful Scottish supporter summed up the English as being "tolerant with a dark side". This, unlike the final stereotyping frame of a lone, kilted Scotsman, tartaned to the gills and drunk in Trafalgar Square, seemed about right.
In contrast, Three Lions had all the crucial footage of England's successes and failures since the 1966 World Cup. Screened over three nights, the opening episode focused on Alf Ramsey's teams in 1966 and 1970. In particular, it concentrated on the late Bobby Moore, who, it was revealed, suffered a cancer scare even before 1966. The England v West Germany final was sufficiently close in time to the second World War for strong passions to be understandable. Yet the British media, though it wasn't by any means free of xenophobia, was less jingoistic than it has since become.
As footballers have become stronger and fitter, the wider society has clearly coarsened. By the time of the third episode of Three Lions, Paul Gascoigne was the concentrated-upon English player. From Moore to Gascoigne, even with the blip of goody two-boots Gary Lineker in between, the coarsening of English society could be traced in its national football icons. Talented as Gazza was in 1990, it's hard to imagine Alf Ramsey, with his clipped, old-world tones indulging Gascoigne's rudeness. Belching back at Alf wouldn't have been the best move if you wanted a place on the team.
Between them, the Soul of Britain and the football documentaries charted a society in almost as much flux as our own. Organised religion went into decline about three decades earlier in Britain, of course. And for all Albert Camus's declaration that "all I know for certain about the morality and obligations of men, is that I owe it to football", football morality is a dubious substitute. We saw Maradona's "Hand of God" goal from all sorts of angles. Even though he was the greatest player of his (or perhaps any) generation, he was something less than an example of divine morality.
THE J-1 visa brigade, 8,500 strong, has just left for student work in the United States. Full of energy, hormones and dreams, they generally head for the tourist resorts along the East Coast. Last year, 21-year-old Anna Rodgers from Co Down turned herself into the subject of a documentary on J-1 life. The opening episode of this two-part travelogue saw her in San Francisco and New York. Throughout, she appeared to be searching for the lost America of Jack Kerouac.
In the half-century or so since Kerouac went on the road, the beatnik trail has, not surprisingly, faded. The differences between America and Ireland now are nothing compared with the differences in the 1950s. Still, for the J-1ers, the US remains an adventure, albeit an adventure on a diminishing scale. Even though it is the engine of globalisation, America, in trying to remake much of the world in its own image, has, in consequence, lessened its unfamiliarity.
For all that, the fresh faces of the students were like those who J-1ed before them. We met Seamus Allen working in an ice-cream parlour on New York's Fifth Avenue. Seamus called New York "a town" and clearly had swallowed the American Dream. In one sense, his enthusiasm, like that of Rodgers, was commendable. In another, it reminded you that J-1 visas are issued only for working holidays. Discovering the Soul of America, which Kerouac set out to find, requires a deeper, more worldly immersion, even in the land which most reveres sociology by numbers.